All my hair is falling out

In March of 2018 I had a procedure.  It could have been performed "outpatient" and sedated in the OBGYN office with the door closed but I chose to do it in an OR under anesthesia.  Because of the bedes and my goofy health record I just felt better doing it in an operating room.

The procedure was an endometrial ablation.  Google it.  It changed my life.

In March of 2019 I had surgery.  After having some intense abdominal pain off and on for a couple of weeks, I got an appointment with my internal medicine specialist.  She sent me for a CT scan and thought I maybe I had diverticulitis.  The CT scan showed some random tissue growing around my ureter, potentially messing with my kidneys and bladder.  After an appointment with a very grumpy urologist who was not interested in helping a woman in her early 40's, I was back at the OBGYN who agreed to do an exploratory laparoscopic procedure to see what was the root of the problem.

The surgery that was supposed to take 90 minutes took almost 4 hours.   The tissue was a severe case of endometriosis.  All the tissue was carefully removed so as not to damage any of the ureter and kidney stuff, as well as a baseball sized ovarian cyst and my left Fallopian tube.  Good thing I didn't need that anymore.

The recovery was pretty okay and I came home from the hospital with photographs of all my insides that were fixed up; four nice bruises and some internal stitches that after several weeks started to make there way out of my skin.  I was told by my doctor to just trim the strings and let them do their thing.

In March of 2020 I was supposed to have surgery to fix a nagging ankle injury and a very deformed hammer toe. 

This story needs to back up a bit though, to January 2019.  One one of the Saturday's in January, after a Jr. Jazz game, I went up for a layup in heeled boots and I lost my footing in glorious spastic fashion and fell. You may have felt the earthquake.  There was quite an audience laughing at me but the pain was so intense I thought I might throw-up.  Though I was laughing, it was just to hide the tears.  The pain was incredibly intense and having a really bad ankle it was obvious that my failed attempt at looking cool had earned me a pretty serious sprain.

This bad ankle had been haunting me for years before and continued to bother me the rest of 2019.  For Thanksgiving we went to Disneyland and one night in the town home we'd rented, as everyone was sleeping and my blood sugar dropped low I fell down the stairs heading to the fridge for a glass of chocolate milk.  Rolled my ankle and spent the rest of the trip in pain.

I'll make the story shorter now.

In January 2020 I paid my podiatrist, a really good guy a visit.  The x-ray showed that within the last year I'd broken my ankle and had ruptured tendons as well as some bone fragments.  The MRI a week later showed torn ligaments and confirmed that surgery was the only way to fix what was now, more than ever, my very fragile ankle.

In February, the surgery was scheduled for March 19.  Little did we know back then that Covid-19 would infect the world, everything would shut-down, and on March 19 Salt Lake would get hit with an earthquake.  Obviously the surgery was postponed and I was put on stricter than average quarantine orders so that when surgical centers opened again, I could be first in line to get the dumb ankle and wonky hammer toe fixed up for good.

At the end of April I got the call that surgery could go ahead for May 7th.  When the day arrived, I was the only patient in triage in the surgical center and my doctor was the only one operating that day.  I had to wear a mask the entire time, sign extra paper work and do things on my own that under different circumstances a nurse probably would have done had it not been for the Corona-virus.   I ended up with a fixed ankle that healed pretty quickly and a 4 inch pin in my toe for 5 weeks that left me wheel chair and crutches bound.  I don't recommend getting hammer toes fixed.  And, all of this went down while we were in the process of moving, doing online home school, and Ross working from home.  But that is a melodrama for another day.

Now, if anyone ever reads this, and has made it this far you are probably wondering what is the point of this surgical chronology?

The point is very simple.

All my hair is falling out.